


The Quality of Pain

by Gairid



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 09:17:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2616464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gairid/pseuds/Gairid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post MtD - Headcanon version of what happened after Lestat awakened on the floor of the chapel in St. Elizabeth's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quality of Pain

**The Quality of Pain**

**(Louis)**

I awakened to find him curled closely around me; the deathsleep no longer gripped him but his slumber was deep. His face was pressed into the hollow of my shoulder, his scent filled my head, beloved, familiar and painful.

How often had he left me behind? 

In the old days it would be weeks, sometimes months. The constant pull and drag of heat and coldness, anger and tenderness tormented me until he nearly drove me mad. An old story now and one that I had more than enough time to dwell upon in the long years we were apart. The sweetness of reunion, dashed to pieces when he went to Akasha. After her destruction, he wrapped himself in grief and guilt and he tried to destroy himself by staring into the face of the sun. He forgets, perhaps, that he outshines even that.

He left again and again, trying to find-- what? I didn't know. His attempt to die and not take me with him hurt me most of all, more than Akasha or David or even my poor, doomed Claudia. How could he think to leave me forever? Did he think I could bear to go on without him? 

The months I spent watching him on the floor of the chapel of that place on Napoleon Street, locked in some hell of his own devising or perhaps that of some other, sharpened my pain into an acute and focused band of anguish that often left me struggling for breath in a way I had not known since I was a mortal man. It was scant comfort that he would suffer only me to sit close by him, to touch his cold flesh and look into his staring eyes, glazed, yet somehow aware.

He shifted against me and his flesh was not cold, not now. Pressed together we have always found our own heat. I pulled the quilt up to cover his bare shoulder and I found myself captured by the glint of the flickering pillar candle in his golden hair. I have not spoken to him of pain; did I not see it reflected in his blue eyes when he looked back at me, mute and troubled? Instead, I focused on reaffirming our frayed bond, worn from struggle but still in place. We have been in this bed more than out of it since I brought him back here and the hunger that I had been steadfastly ignoring had grown now into a ravening creature unto itself. I had not fed in nearly two weeks, unwilling to leave him alone at St. Elizabeth's. Now that we were home, I found myself afraid that I would return only to find him gone from me once again, his eyes blank and wide.

The phone still rings and they still came to the door in the evenings, sometimes singly and sometimes together, Marius and Armand and David and even Maharet. Brian managed to keep them away from us, his natural fear of them submerged beneath his concern and the absolute assurance he had that I would back up his words should the need arise. He understood that I would brook no interference from them. This evening had been quiet thus far. I would have taken Lestat away from here if he had asked it of me, but he wished to be nowhere but in our own home, this place we have shared on and off since he first brought me to him.He moved, his hand gripping my arm with sudden, bruising panic.

"C'est moi, Lestat." I told him softly. The quality of physical pain is distant and unreal. " _Lestat, c'est moi, nous sommes tous les deux à la maison. Ne t'en fais pas._." 

"Louis?" 

He raised his head to look at me and my heart was wrenched to see the confusion in his eyes. After a moment the confusion cleared and his relief was a palpable thing. I moved to gather him in but he resisted, his eyes trained on mine. His fingers caressed the bruised place on my biceps.

"You're thirsting, Louis," he said, "And if you will not yet take from me, will you go and hunt?"

There was no hint of reproach or upset in his voice. I had not yet taken his blood, nor had he taken mine in the few days since I have brought him home. His tentativeness also caused me pain that was much more intense than the nearly bone-snapping grip he’d used upon his abrupt awakening. There was so much that lay uneasily between us, no matter how close our bodies were in this bed, no matter how he trembled to have within him at long last before we were claimed by the deathsleep this morning.

"I don't like to leave you alone." In his eyes I see understanding. He knew in that moment my fear that he would lapse somehow back into the state he had been in.

"Believe me, I'll stay awake," he said with a hint of his devil-be-damned smile. It fled as quickly as it had arrived and his blue eyes went distant. "And I got away from him, Louis, so there's no need to worry."

"Got away from who?" I asked. He looked questioningly at me. "You said you got away from him. Who did you get away from?"

"I don't know. The Devil, I suppose. The one in the dream I was having," he said vaguely. He rose from the bed and looked at me where I still sat, swathed in the sheets. "I'll dress, Louis and wait for you in the parlour. Or I'll stay right here in the bed, only you must hunt. I know you need to drink and there is no use in you denying it."

"The others--"

"The others will leave me alone. Brian will turn them away as he has been doing. Please, Louis. I know it's been much longer than the few days since you brought me home." 

 

****

Lestat

He left the bedroom, assuring me that he would not stay away long. I heard him speaking to Brian in the office followed by Brian's answering murmur and then a moment later, the door closed downstairs His thirst had to have been one of long weeks, because he went in spite of the anxiousness I’d seen in his eyes. I'd been months lying on the floor, he had told me when I asked him.

_Louis was right there when I came back to myself, right at my side. His green eyes were opaque at first and then he realized that I could see him and the flat distance dissolved into a blaze of fierce love. My first wondering thought was that he loved me still after all that had happened, all I had done to him. When I moved to sit up, he caught my arm to assist me as though I were an invalid. Shaky as I felt, I knew the strength was still there, I could feel it, monstrous as ever. How much better to feel his hand on my arm, to take the support he offered._

_Confusion set in when I began to notice the others around me, the room thick with hungry anticipation. There was Maharet and I lifted my lips in an instinctive and threatening snarl to see her. David and Marius and Armand. Others. Someone was racketing thunderously away on a piano, out of sight and I wondered if it was that noise that had finally awakened me from the nightmare I'd felt so trapped in._

_They gathered around me, cautiously at first, and then the questions, in my head and out loud. I had no answers for them...indeed I could barely speak, and the tone of the words took on the inflection of adults talking to a pitiable idiot child. Beside me, Louis had gone stiff and wooden, and I wondered that none of them seemed to notice his anger._

_"Louis, I want to leave." I said._

_Such a furor my words caused, the type of dissension I would have reveled in not so long ago. The Vampire Lestat. A wash of revulsion swept over me._

_"Louis, s'il te plait..." I muttered._

_"Be easy Lestat. We will leave soon," he said. I'd risen to my feet and some of the strangers, vampires I did not recognize, backed away a little._

_"Louis, surely you can't think to take him away tonight. He could be dangerous."_

_"Why not stay here with him for a while longer."_

_"Not safe..."_

_"...ill-advised...you are stubborn..."_

_Voices and meaningless words. The talk flowed past me and I was hard-pressed to listen or to make sense of it. How long had I been here? A week? Louis smelled exhausted and hungry when I'd awakened._

_"We do not even know what happened, Louis, what caused it. Let me at least come back with you." That was David's clipped accent followed by Louis' adamant refusal.  
"What will you do if he becomes...unmanageable? Forgive me, Louis, but your strength," David persisted. _

_"And pardon me, David, if I tell you I don't need you to tell me how to take care of him or myself. I seem have managed this far without your help." Louis said._

_One of the young ones took advantage of Louis' momentary distraction to approach me. I was unable to muster up any curiosity; I only knew that for once in my life I was entirely sick of being looked at. I raised my head as he took a step closer. He stopped when he heard Louis' low snarl. "You." Louis said to him, stepping up beside me. "Leave this city. Tonight. If I see you again I will destroy you."_

_The young one uttered a laugh, but he was at least intelligent enough to back away and there was fear in his eyes._

_Louis took my hand and I went with him past all of them, a literal gauntlet of vampires, their mind voices raising a tumult that I had some trouble blocking. From somewhere else in that place, the piano still thundered. We were only a block away when he spoke. "Shall we leave the city, Lestat? Get away for a while?"_

_"I want to go home." There was so much more I wanted to say to him, but it was so difficult to think and there was a vague fear in me that I had not yet escaped whatever had held me down. He seemed to know this, as he always knows things about me, and he only nodded. We walked home silently and that silence was good, it was welcome._

I went to the dressing room, deliberately avoiding the looking glass. I didn't want to see the devil that haunted me. I didn't want to see myself. There were two hooks on the wall, a silken robe hanging on each one. No scent of Louis on either of them, only the faint smell of laundry soap. I slipped one on, belting it snugly around my waist.

He had very obviously not been staying here since I'd been away from him. The strongest scent in the house was Brian's and that centered in the office where he has apparently been trying to keep up with all the things I have been neglecting. He can do that, keep things running smoothly and what was I doing thinking about things running smoothly? There is nothing smooth about the way I have handled things since I woke up nearly a decade ago. 

The phone rang and Brian picked it immediately. At that same moment there was a sudden and aggressive assault in my head, a battering at the clumsy shielding I have been attempting since I woke up. I heard myself growling and something crashed to the floor. The assault ended. Disoriented, I took a step toward the chairs near the hearth.

There came a hurried knock on the door and Brian put his head in, eyes wide as he stared into the dark room. "Are you all right?" He asked anxiously, flicking the lights on. I had inadvertently overturned a vase of flowers and the little table it had been standing on. The carpet was soaked, the air thick with the scent of lilies.  
"A little clumsy, I'm afraid." I said, staring at the vase which had cracked into several pieces. 

He gaped at me for a moment, swallowing reflexively. "Don’t worry about it. I'll take care of it." And he did, moving quietly and efficiently, as though noise would somehow hurt me--as though he was in a sickroom.

"Who was on the phone?" I asked as he laid a thick towel on the soaked carpet.

"Marius." Brian said, meeting my gaze. His eyes were filled with questions. The door opened downstairs and he started as though wakened from a dream. "Louis is back," he said unnecessarily. He nearly crashed into Louis as he left the room with the shards of the vase in one hand and the remains of the flowers in a plastic bag.

"Just a little accident." Brian said to Louis, backing into the hall. 

"Lestat, what has happened?"

"Someone trying to get in. In my head." I mumbled, leaning against him. He smelled of salt and blood and some faint perfume, whatever his victim had worn, and my fingers sought the heat of his flesh. "I knocked the flowers over, that's all." 

"Who tried to get in?"

"I don't know." I couldn't tell, and it was difficult to keep resisting." I felt off-balance and, absurdly, on the brink of tears.

"Never mind, angel." His hands caressed my shoulder blades. The minute whisper of his nails on the silk calmed me.

**(Louis)**

Holding him still had the unreality of the dreams I had every day since he left and I could nott stop myself from moving against him, stroking him and massaging the angles of the bones beneath his golden flesh.

'Someone trying to get in. In my head,' he'd said. To my knowledge Lestat has never had any trouble keeping his thoughts shielded. He is a master at keeping things hidden and no one knows this better than I do. I pushed the bitterness aside, for there was no place for it here.

We moved together, the slip and glide of fabric adding an element of restriction that seemed as distracting to Lestat as it was to me. His body was no longer tense and resistant as it had been when I had first taken him into my arms and so I lay aside my worry about what had happened in my absence. I pushed him back and untied the belt at his waist. He stood very still, his hands at his sides, fingers curled slightly. The silky fabric parted and revealed him to me, and the feeling of unreality was dashed to pieces when I looked at him. He stayed my hand when I reached to slide the robe from his shoulders.

"You, Louis." he whispers, and I understood him immediately, for we have always been supremely in tune with one another physically. There is a low urgency between us and I removed my clothes and put them aside. 

"Have I said, _mon amour_ , how deeply grateful I am that I have you?"

The words pierced me, though he did not mean them to; he has ever spoken of me possessively. In his eyes and voice there is no hint of manipulation. He’s used words and seduction to keep me with him more times than I can count, and time after time I have succumbed to him. This is not one of those times, though perhaps only because I have brought him here.

The pain of these things did nothing to douse the heat that danced around us, between us...inside us. He shrugged his shoulders and the robe fell to the floor. We moved together to the bed and he came into my arms, trembling once again.

"There is nothing to fear," I whispered, "I have you." I touched his mouth with mine and he breathed my name. The kiss was a gradual thing, the lightest meeting of parted lips, moist and warm, a mingling of sighed breath. I pushed him onto his back, sucking on his tender lower lip. His foot curved around my calf as I settled my body atop his, aligning myself to the swell of his muscled thighs, the sweet hollow just below his ribs. 

The nights following his awakening had been spent wordlessly cocooned, mending the frayed ends of our strained bond, learning how to be together again. Our joining the night before had been frantic, his need a wordless huge thing sprouted from the long time we had been apart, the gradual drift away from one another that widened from days to months to over a year. Following that, the months he'd spent lost and wandering while his body lay motionless on a marble floor. 

The kiss deepened and he became relaxed and pliant beneath me. The heated recess of his mouth was mine to roam, and my tongue was eager, exploring the slick velvet of his inner cheek, the arch of his palate, the shapes of his teeth and fangs. He sucked on my tongue and I knew he was resisting the urge to bite down. To taste me. 

The quality of pain that welled up this time was a deep ache, nurtured over long years. He held back, for my sake this time, though he was unsure why I was not ready to share his blood; I wanted more from him than the same words of assurance, the same declarations of love. I knew that he meant these things when he said them, but I am determined that if he chose to stay with me that I would have all of him. Pain was submerged once again in a surging tide of desire, for his hands were now moving over me and the uncertainty was gone from his touch. His fingers and palms moved with knowing surety and I thought...I thought...how can he know what I want so easily, yet not give to me what I need?

Ahh, but he was here and he has been gone for too long, in a place where I could do nothing to help him. I broke the kiss and raised myself up to look down into his face. There was still that confused vagueness in his eyes, and I became frightened all over again that he would disappear again, leaving only the shell of himself behind. 

"I have you." I told him again. I licked at his face and his hands tightened at my waist.

**(Lestat)**

When he took his mouth from mine there was a moment when I was sure that I had imagined all of this and that I when I turned my head I would see the cold, featureless place that I had been trapped in, that place where I heard the voices of others of my kind, disembodied and far off...the place where I could smell Louis but I could not see him, could not hear him.

He hovered over me, the black veil of his hair falling forward in a motion that is deeply familiar, well loved. There was sorrow in his green eyes and I understood that he was hurt. Pain--levels of it, pain on pain and all of it could be laid at my feet. "I have you," he said, and he leaned to lick my face, just beneath my eye. It was a tenderness he had always given me. My hands rested lightly at his waist and I tightened my grip a feeling the heat that coiled between us flick out, lashing us both. He pressed his erection into my belly, slick with the bloodsweat that streaked our bodies. I closed my eyes and he continued his slow undulation, hips moving against me, building a delicious, maddening friction. 

"Look at me, Lestat." he said softly. I did as he asked. "Whatever happened...wherever you were, you are back. It's over now." He lowered himself and I slid my arms up his back, clinging tightly even as he crushed his mouth to mine in a fierce and bruising kiss. When he broke from me again there was no more fear that I was dreaming, not now with the bright taste of his blood on my tongue. His lips were stained with it.

"Strong," he whispered, marveling. "Powerful. These things have not changed. Show me, Lestat and this time take me with you." There was the excruciating moment when he abandoned his position on my body to lie back against the sheets, and I felt like there must be wounds where our flesh met and then parted. But then I was on him and his arms closed around me; My shuddering was no longer fear, it was desire and lust and a need that I had not let myself recognize in far too long. There is an emptiness in me that only Louis has ever filled and all the outrageous and thoughtless things I have done won't change it. 

Why had I wanted to change it? There is the question. I couldn't think, though, not with his hand closed around me, taking me in hand--and he doesn't _want_ me to think, no, because he doesn't want to think either, I knew it from his urgency, from the kisses, turned bloody and rough. Entering his body was bliss, tight, heated velvet, his long legs hooked over my shoulders. His hot gaze remained steady, even though his body was wracked with shivering and his breath came forth in little groans with each thrust of my hips. Hours. Abandoned hours, with no more words necessary for he bared his throat to me at last and I drank from him, drank in his pain and his love and the savage ecstasy of his release. Misted in crimson and through all of it I swam in the deep tide of his love.

**(Louis)**

He dozed lightly, still atop me and to have his lovely, familiar weight on me filled me with unutterable peace. I felt like I could lie this way forever, with the taste of him still rich in my mouth, listening to him breathe. I was wracked with ecstatic little jolts that made my skin twitch and my nerves sing. He shifted from me and I rolled onto my side so that he could spoon against my back. I loved to sleep fitted together so naturally and as if in direct answer to this thought he moved into that position, pushing a leg between mine.

" _Mon ange_." he mumbled, sliding his hand under my arm and twining his fingers with mine. His somnolent, drowsy heat had melted away the remnants of my fear that he would slip away from me in his sleep..

"C'est moi." I said again and he pressed his lips to the nape of my neck before falling still again.

His blood pulsing through my veins and was potent and powerful. Maddening, too, to feel it surging through me like electricity; dangerous, like liquid fire. It has been a long while since I have tasted him, felt his mind. He still kept so much hidden; there were walls there and locked doors and the quality of that pain is keen, a shining razor's edge.

I have walked that edge for long years. There is little I could deny Lestat and if the love I bear for him is painful, it as also the truest part of me. He has my heart and if he has been ungentle with it, I have not been without my share of the blame. To endure pain is one of the qualities of love. None of the pain matters now. 

None of it.

****

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> This is an older story, written in March of 2003. Back then I was most comfortable writing in first person, present tense and there are versions of that lurking about, I think. I've changed that and I think it reads a little better this way.


End file.
